[WikiEN-l] Rampant Deletionism

Fri Nov 7 01:06:49 UTC 2003

I haven't had much time for Wikipedia stuff lately, but I've been watching
the lists... the main reason I've refrained from several-day-delayed
responses has been that Cunctator has said it better than I could. With this
thread, it's very good to see Jimbo reminding people of the principles at
work here.

I've seen a distinct slide downward with VFD lately... a couple weeks ago, I
decided that I would no longer vote 'delete' on any article. Which doesn't
mean I voted keep on everything... only for those I felt had distinct value.
I abstained from otehrs simply because there's already so many delete votes
that will automatically appear for practically anything on VFD...

An experiment I won't make because I hate when people do stupid things to
prove a point, and I fear the point'd be proven: List everything on
Brilliant Prose on VFD. See how many delete votes you get. It'd likely be a
rather large number, with anything under 32K decried as a "useless stub" and
"unencyclopedic", and over 32K as a "long and pointless ramble".

Now, there's been discussion on [[Wikipedia_talk:Deletion policy]] about
criteria for valid voting. This is discussed in a few ways, but there is a
valid point that if there are going to be votes, there needs to be something
to oppose "sock puppets"... now that the edit-count barrier dropped from 100
to 25, and the account is only required to have existed for one week, I
don't have a particular problem with it. The 2/3s majority for deletion
bothers me a lot, even if (as has been pointed out to me) there are very few
articles that end up with votes in the range between 2/3 and 3/4 (which I
consider much more sensible). The trouble is, there are relatively few
people pushing for rules that restrict deletion- the majority of opinions on
the matter seem to be interested in reducing barriers to deletion as fast as
possible, putting the burden of proof on those defending an article... the
second most vocal faction (and it's become disturbingly factionalized there)
is those saying that it should all be a consensus thing, that any voting is
evil, that one person should be able to block any action. Which I don't find
terribly helpful.

I've seen a lot of dodging of the "what does it hurt?" question, the most
I've seen is "it DOES hurt" or "it doesn't belong in an encyclopedia". The
first response isn't an answer, and begs the question to be repeated. As to
the second... what do you define an encyclopedia as? LKWR is the only one
I've seen outline criteria (back on 10/31), 4 of which describe Wikipedia
excellently, and I disagree with the other 2.
The issue is that when people say "encyclopedia" they tend to be referring
to "paper encyclopedia", which is effectively all that's existed to date-
all the big encyclopedias have CD and 'net versions these days, but they're
just the paper with lots of pictures and some sounds and movies here and
there: the people who work on those versions are specifically told not to
put work into any text that won't go into the paper version (I have this
from a friend who worked on Grolier's online edition, who informs me that
the others do the same.). Wiki Is Not Paper. I strongly oppose use of things
like "that's not what an encyclopedia is", because what are you using as a
standard? F&W, Britannica, Grolier, something like that, yes? They're
designed around what fits in paper- there's massive size constraints. A full
print copy of Britannica is really, really big.

(This is getting a bit long.) I'm going to propose again what I proposed
once before: a temporary moratorium on deletions. Let's say two weeks.
Copyvios will be the only exception. Blanking can be used if there's felt to
be no value at all to the content, but if there's verifiable information in
it, leave it. Let's try it and see what happens, hmmm?

-- Jake